Blake, William

BLAKE, William (1757-1827). The Waking of Leonora, original design for the tailpiece in a bilingual edition of Leonora. A tale by Gottfried August Bürger (1796).
FINE AUTOGRAPH PEN-AND-INK AND WATERCOLOR DRAWING, finished in black, red, two tints of blue and grey wash, on wove paper (82 x 140mm). Signed in pencil in lower right-hand corner, Blake del - (Paper lightly browned, two small darker stains.) Framed and glazed.
Provenance: probably A.G. Dew-Smith of Cambridge (friend of Robert Louis Stevenson's, scientist, book and Blake collector) -- Mrs. Dew-Smith by 1912, sold at -- Sotheby's, 18 November 1920, lot 16, to Peacock -- James Macdonald, New York, sold 1928 to -- Anton G. Hardy of Manchester, Vermont -- Acquired from Goodspeed's Book Shop 1985.
The London publisher, William Miller, commissioned three designs from Blake for his "new edition" of Bürger's hugely popular Gothic ballad, whose influence reached far beyond the Romantic movement into modern times: William and Leonora riding through the night (frontispiece, Blake's original design lost); Prussian soldiers, Leonora and her mother searching for the missing William (headpiece vignette, Blake's design lost); and this tailpiece vignette showing William rushing towards Leonora, wakened from her dream, her mother close behind (a preliminary pencil sketch is also known, ex-Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Butlin 339).
Bürger first published his poem, Lenore, in the Göttingen Musenalmanach of 1773. No less than four different English translations were published in 1796: J.T. Stanley's, illustrated by Blake (London, 4 o ); W.R. Spencer's, illustrated by Lady Diana Beauclerc (also bilingual, London: J. Edwards, 2 o ); William Taylor's (Norwich: John March, 2 o ); and not least, Walter Scott's (Edinburgh: Manners & Miller, 4 o ). Blake designed the vignette to suit its Romantic subject perfectly and displays unmistakable movement and energy. In the ballad this scene and the subsequent flight to the cemetery are followed by Leonora's death on her bridal bed, which is revealed to be William's grave. Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake 338; for the edition, see Keynes 79.